Premier-designate Stephen McNeil points to caucus members before the start of a meeting at the Liberal office in Halifax on Friday. (INGRID BULMER / Staff)

In the fall of 2011, the re-election of Premier Darrell Dexter and the NDP seemed all but certain.

By then, Dexter had raised taxes, cancelled the Yarmouth ferry and slogged through the MLA expense scandal. He not only survived it all but was dominantly polling above 40 per cent.

He held a healthy lead over Jamie Baillie’s Progressive Conservatives. Stephen McNeil and the Liberals, badly beaten in the 2009 election, were an afterthought in distant third.

Then on Oct. 19, Irving’s Halifax shipyard won the $25-billion contract to build Canada’s next generation of warships.

Despite it not being a provincial project, Dexter and Irving Shipbuilding CEO Jim Irving raised their arms together in the spotlight. Irving publicly thanked the premier.

In a remarkable PR feat, Dexter had managed to position himself at the forefront of possibly the biggest contract ever to come to Halifax.

Even better, Irving was expected to start cutting steel in 2013 — right when the next provincial election would hit.

Conservatives in Ottawa were apoplectic. This was federal money, and they were supposed to be the ones getting the credit.

Instead, both Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Nova Scotia cabinet minister Peter MacKay were over a thousand kilometres away in Ottawa, in order to appear neutral.

A call quickly went out to Jim Irving to find out what the hell was going on. That’s when Irving divulged what had so far been kept secret from the public: the provincial government had offered the company a $260-million forgivable loan to upgrade its shipyard.

The Conservatives fumed and MacKay publicly sparred with Dexter, but there was little else that could be done.

The NDP seemed unbeatable. But things would never be this good again.

It was around this point that the Liberals decided they needed a new game plan. They had recently been trounced in the federal election and the Liberal brand was at an all-time low.

That fall, the provincial party hired Toronto’s Gandalf Group to do an extensive (and expensive) poll of voters — what they liked and what they didn’t like.

This poll, combined with business roundtables and other research, created a wealth of data.

Reading through the numbers, the Liberal campaign team decided the weakness of the NDP was electricity. If they could paint Dexter as an ally of Nova Scotia Power and McNeil as a champion of ratepayers, they could move votes.

It was, in the words of one senior Liberal, the first time they had an evidence-based plan instead of just following their gut instincts.

The Liberals repeatedly hammered away at power rates. They soon saw results.

In February 2012, Corporate Research Associates saw the Liberals narrowly pass the PCs but still trail the NDP by over 15 points. By May, the two were almost neck and neck. By August, the Liberals had leapfrogged the NDP for a lead they would never relinquish.

That lead grew larger when Justin Trudeau became federal leader earlier this year. Just as Michael Ignatieff seemed to drag down the provincial party, Trudeau’s profile seemed to buoy it.

The ability to hand out money tends to help incumbents. But according to multiple interviews, Liberal research showed the public was actually being turned off by corporate handouts.

The New Democrats claimed to be taking a case-by-case approach to economic development, in which those with persuasive business cases would get money while those without one would not. This seemed sensible but had an unintended effect.

Some voters compared the NDP giving the Point Tupper pulp and paper mill $114 million in assistance with the cutting of the annual Yarmouth ferry subsidy of just $6 million and saw the difference as arbitrary and unfair. Or worse, it seemed like buying votes.

As the Liberals rose, the NDP struggled to overcome the missteps and bad breaks.

Many are at a loss to explain how a party that balanced the budget and didn’t have any major scandals could lose 24 seats, falling from 31 to just seven.

To start, Dexter came into power just before the MLA expense scandal hit. Perhaps worse, he was on vacation in the United States when the report dropped.

Though the party would reform the system and move on, it marked the end of the days of Dexter’s massive personal popularity pulling up the party brand. After the expense scandal, his popularity would start polling below the NDP as a whole.

Some challenges were purely bad fortune.

The shipbuilding program would be pushed back two years. Instead of going to the polls as the jobs were starting to roll in, the election would come as Irving was laying off workers to rebuild its shipyard.

And by 2013, the $260-million payment had been made public and was heavily criticized by the opposition. It became a liability instead of a benefit to the government.

The NDP rescue package for the Bowater Mersey pulp and paper mill would fall flat when the company ultimately decided there was no saving the plant. Rather than being heroes, the NDP was seen as throwing away taxpayer money, though much of the aid package was never spent.

Other wounds were self-inflicted, such as the broken promise not to raise the HST.

Program cuts take their toll on any government, and the teacher’s union spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising to protest education budget trimming had an effect.

But the conclusion from interviews and conversations with insiders before and after the election is that the NDP was brought down by general disappointment.

Take, for one example, the Home for Colored Children controversy. When alleged victims of sexual abuse demanded a public inquiry, Dexter said no.

There were justifications for this, including flaws with the public inquiry process and potential liability to the province. A former premier’s office staffer also said the alleged victims group’s organizers initially approved of the NDP’s approach before changing their minds.

Others in the party say they pushed for the government to plunge forward with an inquiry regardless.

In the end, Dexter looked like the bad guy despite his party not being even close to power at the time of the alleged abuses. Whether you see it as pragmatism or timidity, it didn’t bode well for a government swept into power by vowing to do politics differently.

“They seemed to be better prepared to govern at the beginning than they did at the end,” said McNeil in an interview after the election.

“It’s like they got paralyzed and became shy.

“We were quite surprised how, when they came in, I think it’s fair to say they didn’t look like a party that hadn’t governed before. Then all of the sudden things just started coming off the rails for them.”

And the social-activist base seemed to disengage. On election day, NDP campaign volunteers reported hundreds of listed supporters failing to show up to vote. Some view this as a sign the party didn’t do enough for its leftist supporters to keep them happy.

It didn’t help that the Liberals had most of their candidates prepared and door-knocking months earlier, or that the Liberals had learned the lessons of the 2011 federal election and were working with a new digital voter outreach system.

That system — called Liberalist — allowed for some unprecedented co-ordination. For instance, being able to set up hundreds of campaign signs in a riding on the day the writ drops can be a huge psychological boost to campaigners, said one Liberal organizer.

Despite the devastating election results, some in the NDP are still optimistic about how the Dexter legacy will hold up.

Tom Urbaniak, a Cape Breton University political science professor, agrees. He said the legacy of shepherding the province through four tough economic years should help the party — eventually.

“History will not record this government as an utter failure. But there is a malaise in the population, no question about it.”